


Your Friends Probably Mean Well, Even If They Are Notorious Sadists

by koonutkalifee



Category: Gintama
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-07 21:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4278744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koonutkalifee/pseuds/koonutkalifee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The worst thing about Sakata Gintoki is that he reminds him of himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Friends Probably Mean Well, Even If They Are Notorious Sadists

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers up to the end of season 6. Also I apologise for the title I went through about 8.

The first time Hijikata Toushiro meets Sakata Gintoki, he tries to kill him.

Technically it’s nothing personal, and just revenge for embarrassing Kondo, but Hijikata takes everything personally and so goes at Sakata like the earth depends on it.

Sakata shatters his sword with such ease that Hijikata does not think he has ever felt so humiliated in his life. He then staggers off as though drunk, feet clattering loudly on the rooftop tiles, bitching about the cut in his arm.

Hijikata lies on the roof and smokes.

 

The next time Hijikata and Sakata meet, Hijikata tries to kill him again, only this time it is justifiable. Sakata was seen with Katsura, and Katsura is the most wanted person in Edo. Trying to kill him is not unreasonable.

Sakata doesn’t remember his name, and the embarrassment that Hijikata had just been beginning to forget comes back full force.

 

He doesn’t like Sakata. His taste in food is terrible and his taste in films is juvenile and irritating. He eats too loudly and gets along with Sougo far too well. And there is something else, something he can’t quite put a finger on but Sakata is suspicious, suspicious in his lazy attitude and indifference to everything and the illegal wooden sword he has strapped to his waist.

The wooden sword doesn’t make sense to Hijikata. All swords are banned, wooden or not. If he was going to wear a sword, why not a real one?

The question haunts him, until he witnesses Sakata fight someone else, someone who isn’t him, for the first time. He beats the man to a bloody pulp with the flat of his blade and leaves him lying in the street for the Shinsengumi to deal with.

He used the flat of his blade. For some reason, whatever reason, Sakata didn’t want to kill the man.

Hijikata’s suspicion does not dissipate.

 

Sometimes Sakata beats the shit out of Hijikata, and sometimes Hijikata beats the shit out of him.

(It confuses Hijikata, because Sakata is so much stronger than he is, that he is ever allowed to do so. But everything about Sakata is confusing.)

Other times they just get drunk together in silence. Neither will ever say anything, and Hijikata wonders if Sakata is hiding demons worse than his own.

 

Chocolate parfaits seem to be the way to go when trying to get Sakata to do something or keep quiet. Hijikata wonders if it is a little weird how often he buys Sakata parfaits, but Sakata never makes any smart comments and so he keeps his own mouth shut.

Chocolate parfaits and an obsession with JUMP that goes beyond product placement and a love of children’s cartoons. Sakata is more of a child than the children in his care. There is probably a reason.

 

Mitsuba’s death is the third worst thing ever to have happened to him. He knows he was still in love with her, right up to the moment of her passing. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do now, with these awful emotions that are tearing through him and so he sits on the roof and stuffs spiced cracker after spiced cracker into his mouth methodically.

“Fucking spicy crackers,” he mutters loud enough for the person he knows must be on the other side of the roof. “Making my eyes water.”

He hears a cracker crunch a few metres away and somehow the knowledge that Sakata is there is comforting. He doesn’t bother to question it.

 

The red-haired girl that Sougo calls China doesn’t trust him. Or like him. None of the Yorozuya do, but then they seem to hate the government in general.

(The nagging nagging suspicion that still digs tiny claws into Hijikata’s stomach every so often reminds him of the second time he met Sakata, of how he was running with Katsura and the bomb that went off.)

China, as he now calls her, seems to look down on humans as a weak and inferior race, or perhaps it is only Sakata and Otae’s younger brother she looks down on. He watches her and Sougo dance around each other exchanging fists and blows and bullets time after time. Sometimes he stands with Sakata as they do. Other times he himself is fighting Sakata, exchanging punches and sword strikes of their own.

Somehow he bonds with her over their shared hatred of Sougo, enough that they don’t immediately feel the urge to kill the other at just the sight of their face. Sakata calls her a traitor. Hijikata promises to buy her skonbu.

 

When it is time for the Shinsengumi to watch the cherry blossoms fall the Yorozuya are there, because they never seem to not be.

“I suppose they’re the main characters.” Hijikata’s muttering is drowned out by Sougo and China’s shrieking and Shinpachi’s (he finally learned his name) yelling at them to stop. Sakata has stood up and seems to want to fight too, and so they agree on a rock-paper-scissors contest.

They’re both drunk to the point of stupidity by the time it reaches their turn, after watching China and Sougo’s freakshow, and so Hijikata hardly notices – or cares – that he’s actually playing a monstrous dog instead of the Yorozuya bastard. He can hear said bastard slurring behind him, shouting about tax-thieving layabouts, and turns around to drunkenly yell at him.

Sakata is right in his face, close enough that he can feel hot breath against his face as they yell at each other, and it takes an explosion and a maniacal laugh to split them apart.

Hijikata is knocked to the floor and the clear copyright violation in front of him raises its arm to fire at him. It is a moment before he realises that Sakata is stood in front of him, sword raised like he’s going to take out the robot with a hunk of wood while piss-drunk.

“Step aside, Gintoki!” Katsura’s voice booms through the air, and Gintoki yells back.

“I won’t, Zura.”

Zura is an awfully familiar way to address a domestic terrorist and God knows why Katsura knows who Sakata is but this is Sakata he’s talking about and so Hijikata lets it side. “Gintoki…”

His voice is soft and shocked and he’s suddenly horribly aware that he’s on his hands and knees as Gintoki – and when did he start thinking of the Yorozuya bastard as Gintoki – stands in front of him as though he means to shield Hijikata from the robot.

“It’s not Zura, it’s Katsura!”

Gintoki shatters the robot with his wooden sword and Hijikata spends the rest of the evening drinking with his back just a few inches from Gintoki’s. He catches Gintoki smiling at him once.

 

A cursed sword seems like a stupid way to die, or if not to die then have your existence erased. Hijikata feels his soul slipping away from him, piece by piece, and when the only option he has left is to beg the Yorozuya to save Kondo he does.

Gintoki throws himself into every dangerous job he ever receives and Hijikata watches as he does so again, facing off an entire army and then destroying a fucking _helicopter_ just because Hijikata asked him to.  Hijikata falls off a train and then saves the glasses bastard, only to have him shot to pieces before him. They don’t have a choice but to cut him down then and there, before he dies a traitor instead of a friend.

The Yorozuya are gone by the time he’s finished. _What’s one more curse_ he tells them all later, and Gintoki doesn’t turn around.

 

Gintoki is irritating and suspicious and unreliable and annoying and rude and lazy and worst of all he reminds Hijikata of himself, of his own hair-trigger temper and the constant, aching rage that both of them ignore as much as they can.

It’s made worse because Hijikata understands him, understands what Gintoki is. Sougo knows in theory at least that the two of them are the same, cut from the same unrefined cloth but Sougo is not like them. Sougo had a loving sister that died naturally of a sickness and a family of oddballs that he’ll never be able to get rid of.

Hijikata has the Shinsengumi too but there was a time he had nothing because everything was torn from him and Gintoki has the same hollow eyes he’s seen staring back in the mirror.

 

He arrests Gintoki one day, when he is too sleep deprived to be patient (like he’s ever been patient with the bastard) and Gintoki stares at the handcuffs like he’s never seen a pair before.

Sougo, the sick fuck, cuffs their other hands together and leaves them to kill each other. Instead they take down twenty Jouishishi and a motorbike without so much as a knife between them. Hijikata wonders how much he actually trusts the crazy fucker he’s cuffed to as Gintoki jumps over his head and kicks three Jouishishi unconscious.

He doesn’t. That’s the end of it. He wouldn’t trust him with 300 yen or a chuubert. But, as he pulls Gintoki’s head under the swinging arc of a sword and then kicks the sword wielder in the balls, he realises that he trusts Gintoki with his life.

 

Gintoki changes imperceptibly as the years pass by without changing much else. The crowd around him gets bigger – firefighters and swordsmiths, drag queens and nobles, courtesans and ninja and hosts and yakuza – and people flock to him, somehow drawn to the stupid, entrancing light he emits. He still has the eyes of a dead fish and the worth ethic of Sougo, but his dead-fish eyes maybe don’t look quite so empty.

 

Hijikata finds Gin everywhere, and so finding him on the roof with the gang that abducted his useless assistant barely even makes an eyelid twitch.

“Sorry, but you bastards should just give up,” Hijikata tells the people wearing the white uniforms of the Mirawarigumi. “None of you stand a chance against the biggest thorn in the bush.”

Gintoki grins at him and it’s a cold, hollow smile filled with such malice and sadness that even Hijikata hadn’t expected it.

(It had been years since he’d heard the nickname _Thorny Toushi_ and yet it is such a familiar role to slip into. He feels his teenage self wrap around his skin and he still fits him oh so well, the violent child that would tear anything he could to pieces because he was _hurting_ has not left him yet. Hijikata does not think he ever will.)

“Come on, Demon Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi.” Gintoki’s dead voice has taken on a lilting, mocking tone and this is not wholly the Gintoki that Hijikata knows. This person is to Gintoki what Thorny Toushi is to Hijikata. “Let’s see if you can take the head of the Joui patriot Shiroyasha.”

And then it makes sense.

“I’m not trying to save people. And who am I to punish them? All that’s left is to stop them from making the same mistakes we did.” Hijikata doesn’t notice how he slips into the plural but he does notice that the mocking smile on Gintoki’s face is not so mocking anymore, it’s almost proud, and Hijikata thinks that maybe, if they both tried, they could perhaps empathise with the other a little more.

Gintoki then kicks the boy off the roof and Hijikata yells at him, because “What the fuck Yorozuya, you actually killed him!”

“You said I could!” Gintoki is running towards him just as he is running towards Gintoki, and then he sees that Kondo caught the boy and in the split second that Gintoki’s eyes lock with his own he understands everything that Gintoki had planned.

The two meet in the middle of the roof, surrounded by stunned-still members of the Mirawarigumi and the Joui and for a second they freeze, grinning at each other with terrifying eyes and teeth flashing in the dark.

He arrests Gintoki after, because it would be weird if he didn’t, and because he’s known there was something Gintoki was hiding and he’s pissed he didn’t find out sooner. Gintoki just accuses him of having a handcuffs fetish and Hijikata doesn’t both denying it.

 

They are both drunk the first time that they kiss.

It is not the first time they are drunk together and it will not be the last. Gintoki has had enough to drink to kill a lesser man and Hijikata is not far behind.

It is fumbling and awkward, in the dark of one of the thousands of back alleys that Gintoki seems to know, and last barely ten seconds. Gintoki tastes of sake and vodka and Hijikata wants to gag, except his own tongue probably tastes about the same and he is drunk enough that it doesn’t really matter.

 

The white demon is a legend and a horror story and not real, not a real person and certainly not the lazy bastard that Hijikata didn’t notice himself falling in love with. He is revered as one of the last true samurai and feared as the monster that held off an army with just a sword and his hatred of the amanto.

Gintoki has told him that he didn’t give a fuck about the amanto. That the invading species meant shit to him.

The white demon has no name and no one alive had ever been able to give a report on him. No one alive had done more than see him fight, and never from up close.

Hijikata has witnessed the white demon puking in back alleys and picking his nose and howling over lost pachinko games. He knows how the white demon looks when he wakes up and how his silver eyelashes flutter after he’s been kissed. The white demon and the man he fell in love with are the same person, but Gintoki seems too much of a loser to be such a legend.

Perhaps that was intentional.

 

Hijikata has seen Gintoki angry and afraid. He has seen Gintoki unleash holy hell on those who barely deserved it and he has seen him give up on using the flat of his sword and slice through body after body, tearing apart whole armies.

This is not that.

The shriek that left Gintoki’s mouth when the man with white hair that had something to do with the death of Gintoki’s teacher left was not the noise of a mortal man. “Get back here.” Over and over he yelled, until Tsukuyo pulled him to his feet and then he turns to chase after him.

Gintoki did not return. He missed his execution. Later they got a report from Kagura and Shinpachi that Gintoki was at home, asleep. Kagura had clearly only come because she wanted to fight with Sougo and Sougo had obliged despite his injuries and despite hers.

Shinpachi had eyed him weirdly and Hijikata had had to remind himself that he’d done nothing wrong.

 

The first time they have sex, neither of them are drunk.

Hijikata has never fucked anyone before. Gintoki says he was drunk.

“There was a war on.” Gintoki’s eyes darken whenever he mentions the war and Hijikata always drops it.

That was a week before anything happened. Hijikata does not want the lights on and even though he doesn’t ask he knows Gintoki won’t either.

It is over quickly and Hijikata falls asleep tangled almost uncomfortably close to Gintoki. There is a hollow feeling in his gut and he thinks Gintoki feels it too. It is not a bad feeling, but it is not a good one either. It feels like they have finally reached an inevitable conclusion, but the issue lies with the fact that nothing is over.

He buries his face in Gintoki’s chest and feels Gintoki’s face presses into his hair. The arms around him tighten and he tightens his own hold.

 

Gintoki does not get less annoying. Hijikata wonders if he was supposed to.

 

“When are you getting married?” Sougo asks him one day, and Hijikata spits out his coffee. Sougo looks bored.

“Who am I getting married to I’m not getting married don’t be absurd.” Hijikata’s fumbling string of swearwords is met with dead silence. “What?”

Sougo shrugs. “Well, you’ve been fucking the Yorozuya boss for the last three months. I figured it was about time.”

Hijikata chokes and sputters unintelligibly. Sougo sighs.

“I suppose that leaves Kondo in charge of arranging the marriage meeting ‘cos the boss is in charge of that house. How many people do you want attending?” Hijikata’s face is turning an alarming shade of purple and Sougo hides his glee with great difficulty.

“We are not getting married.” Hijikata eventually manages, once his face has calmed to a violent shade of red. “And remember what happened last time we had a marriage meeting between us?”

Sougo looks disappointed and Hijikata wants to tell him to find a new hobby.

 

“Kagura asked me when we were getting married the other day.”

“You told her?”

“Nah.” Gintoki buries his hand in his absurdly thick hair and groans. “She just knew. Shinpachi did too.”

Hijikata remembers the time he grabbed two fistfuls of Gintoki’s hair and yelled in his face, and Gintoki had yelled back louder and threatened to cut his dick off. Shinpachi had looked at him weirdly for days after that, and then Hijikata remembered the time Gintoki had punched some gangster in the face for touching his hair.

“Sougo asked me the same question last week,” Hijikata confesses. “I told him we weren’t.”

“S’what I told Kagura.”

Hijikata doesn’t think he wants to get married. He doesn’t know if he sees a point to it.

“Why, d’you wanna get married, Hijikata?” Gintoki doesn’t sound like he sees a point to marriage either.

“Who knows?” Hijikata blows a puff of smoke into the cold night air and ignores Gintoki’s small breath of relief.

 

He’s _Yorozuya_ when he’s irritating and _bastard_ when he’s worse. _Sakata-kun_ when Hijikata is being polite and _Gintoki_ between kisses.

Gintoki alternates between _tax thief_ and _vice-commander_ when Hijikata is annoying him. _Hijikata-kun_ is used either politely or mockingly, depending on how long the _-kun_ is drawn out. _Toushi_ whenever Gintoki feels like being particularly irritating and _Toushiro_ in the silent stillness of night, when there is no one else left alive in the world and neither thinks they will ever see another person again.

When they are fighting together, and not with each other, they think of the other as _Shiroyasha_ and _Demon Vice-Commander._ They take a horrible kind of pride in their bloodstained nicknames, and for a moment they are able to relish the trail of bodies that they have left behind them instead of feeling empty and sickened.

Gintoki doesn’t cry on those nights, because Gintoki only ever cries over spilled parfaits and sold-out JUMP and really good food.

 

In the few months that pass Hijikata receives visits from a string of absurd people.

China is first. She throws him through a wall. “Don’t do anything weird in my apartment, and don’t upset Gin-chan.” Her priorities make him cough a laugh with the little air left in his lungs.

Shinpachi comes next, far more civilised than China or Gintoki would ever be. He looks nervous but Hijikata has met him enough times to be cautious. “I don’t really understand it, but look after him.” Hijikata doesn’t question what he doesn’t understand because he knows he’ll get a long, long rant about how their relationship doesn’t make sense.

Gintoki’s landlady, Otose, tells him that Gintoki is no good and that Hijikata would be best off without him. She somehow makes these insults sound fond, and Hijikata realises that she is the closest thing Gintoki has to a mother.

A woman with long purple hair hangs upside down in front of him and squints at him through her glasses. “No, definitely not. You’re definitely not good enough for my Gin. What is he thinking? Did you brainwash him, huh?” Hijikata ignores her, because he has to work, unlike anyone else in Edo.

Otae and Kyubei catch him one day. Otae smiles sweetly at him and tells him she’ll rip his balls off if he upsets Gin, and Kyubei stands behind her and silently dares him to retaliate.

He gets other visits, too. A scary blonde lady and a ninja with eyes hidden behind hair messier than Gintoki’s and an old mechanic and a lady in a wheelchair with a kid all come and make vague threats in his direction. Even fucking _Katsura_ comes to see him, and in the seconds that Hijikata is not trying to kill him tries to offer him advice. Katsura runs away yelling about the glory of Edo and Hijikata makes a mental note to borrow Sougo’s bazooka for the next time he visits.

 

Gintoki is a lazy bastard. He is rude and angry and sleeps and eats too much. He has too many people that care about him for it to be possible for him to be oblivious to his own self-worth and yet he lives in miserable ignorance of this fact.

Hijikata punches him in the face and thinks, _God, I love this man_ , and when Gintoki kicks him right back he knows he is thinking almost exactly the same.

 

“Okita came to talk to me earlier.” Hijikata groans as one of his least favourite topics of conversations comes up.

“What did the shitty sadist want this time?” It must have been important if Gintoki felt it necessary to bring it up.

“He asked me to kill you in your sleep.” Hijikata kicks Gintoki’s shin and Gintoki pulls his hair, which quickly degenerates into a full-on wrestling match on the narrow confines of the mattress they’re on. “Then he told me if I did anything weird he’d stuff that bazooka down my throat and fire it.”

“What did you say?” Hijikata has settled so he is a few inches from Gintoki, staring at the ceiling.

“I’d do it if your handcuff fetish got out of hand.”

Hijikata shoves Gintoki off of the mattress and hogs as much of the blanket as he can. Gintoki spends the rest of the night trying to get the blankets back, insisting he’s cold. Eventually, Hijikata allows the idiot to sprawl across him, the warm weight of his empty head comforting on his cold shoulder.

 

The next day, he opens the drawer in his desk to find the contents have been replaced with fourteen pairs of handcuffs. Life has been weirder.

**Author's Note:**

> help me i'm in gintoshi hell and there's no way out


End file.
